Y2Kyoto: Sponsored In Part By The World Wildlife Fund

Donna Laframboise has been playing with the AR4 search function;

When one types “WWF” into an AR4 search box dozens of references are returned.
For example, a WWF report is cited twice on this page as the only supporting proof of IPCC statements about coastal developments in Latin America. A WWF report is referenced twice by the IPCC’s Working Group II in it concluding statements. There, the IPCC depends on the WWF to define what the global average per capita “ecological footprint” is compared to the ecological footprint of central and Eastern Europe.
Elsewhere, when discussing “mudflows and avalanches” linked to melting glaciers, the oh-so-scientifically-circumspect IPCC relies on two sources to make its point – an apparently still unpublished paper delivered to a conference five years earlier (Bhadra, 2002) and a WWF document.
Similarly, the only reason the IPCC can declare that “Changes in climate are affecting many mountain glaciers, with rapid glacier retreat documented in the Himalayas, Greenland, the European Alps, the Andes Cordillera and East Africa” is because a WWF reportmakes this claim.
In a section on coral reefs and mangroves, a WWF report is the IPCC’s sole reason for believing that, in “the Mesoamerican reef there are up to 25 times more fish of some species on reefs close to mangrove areas than in areas where mangroves have been destroyed.”
When the IPCC advises world leaders that “climate change is very likely to produce significant impacts on selected marine fish and shellfish (Baker, 2005)” it doesn’t call attention to the fact that the sole authority on which this statement rests is a WWF workshop project report….

Nice work. Be sure to distribute it widely.

The Sound Of All Hell Breaking Loose: True Confessions

Like a snowball…

The UN’s top climate change body has issued an unprecedented apology over its flawed prediction that Himalayan glaciers were likely to disappear by 2035.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said yesterday that the prediction in its landmark 2007 report was “poorly substantiated” and resulted from a lapse in standards. “In drafting the paragraph in question the clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedures, were not applied properly,” the panel said. “The chair, vice-chair and co-chairs of the IPCC regret the poor application of IPCC procedures in this instance.”

rolling …

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.
Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.
In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.

…downhill.

Jonathan Leake’s story at the Time is Online, linking Pauchari’s TERI organization to government funding grants that were solicited using the bogus “Himalayan glaciers will disappear by 2035″ claim.
Christopher Booker of the Telegraph has a story that shows Pachauri’s own employee at TERI was the source of the bogus glacier claim. Now the corruption comes full circle.

Stay tuned….
Update: The Purge Begins at NASA

Reader Tips

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation, here is the Eugen Maersk, II, III, IV, V, episode of Mega Builders: “Building the World’s Largest Container Ship”, from the Odense Steel Shipyard, in Denmark, in 2008. The Danish registered Eugen Maersk is 398 meters or 1,305 feet long, and 56 meters or 154 feet wide, and she has a deadweight of 156,907 tons. Her Wartsila diesel engine delivers up to 90 megawatts (about 120 thousand horsepower), and she has the world’s largest propeller (with a diameter of 9.5 meters or 31 feet). And for your ease of reference, here’s a link to our November 14, 2009, Late Nite Radio show on large ship engines.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

The Sound Of Settled Science

In much the same way that temperature changes recorded in Saskatoon are representative of changes in Seattle… (Or Florida).

…[Gavin Schmidt*] also said a smaller sampling of weather stations in the Canadian Arctic wouldn’t have a significant impact on the data. He said any long-term temperature changes recorded at the high Arctic station at Eureka, would likely be “representative” of changes elsewhere in the region, even in a sub-Arctic city like Yellowknife.
“Temperature anomalies don’t vary that much from one (nearby) station to another,” he said. “You don’t need thousands of stations across Canada to know what the monthly anomalies are.”

eureka_yellowknife.jpg

If you aren’t by now alarmed that public policy makers are about to tax us to the tune of billions on the say-so of charlatans such as this, there’s something amiss with your cognitive abilities.

Helprin

At the top of his game.

Take Manhattan, but first take the Hamptons, where symptoms are readily apprehended, just as the pulse at the wrist is a telltale of the heart. Mere multimillionaires cannot afford anymore to go where within living memory actual people made a living from the farms, clam beds, and sword-fishing grounds. Now the potato fields are covered with houses that look like the headquarters of Martian expeditionary forces, ice-cream factories, vacuum cleaners on stilts, the Seagram building on its side, or shingled New England cottages monstrously swollen into something you might see after eating a magic mushroom. In simple and quiet towns that once deferred to the majesty of the ocean, the streets are now clogged with a kabuki theater of Range Rovers and $35,000 handbags.

I Miss Guantanamo

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Closure of Detention Facilities at Guantánamo. The detention facilities at Guantánamo for individuals covered by this order shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than 1 year from the date of this order. If any individuals covered by this order remain in detention at Guantánamo at the time of closure of those detention facilities, they shall be returned to their home country, released, transferred to a third country, or transferred to another United States detention facility in a manner consistent with law and the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States.

The Journalist’s Name Is “Thomas L. Day”

I placed his name in the headline so that should you run across it in the future, you’ll be cautioned that the content you’re about to read may be unreliable;

A couple of weeks ago, a few of us in the blogosphere were e-mailed by a journalist in Kabul who was looking to do some research for a story he was writing about military vehicles and IED deaths in Afghanistan. The thesis he ran by all of us was that “non-US coalition partners (Canada included) are taking casualities because they simply are not driving vehicles that are effective against the IED.”
We tried to gently turn his head from that over-simplistic notion. And at the time, I naively thought we were doing a decent job of it.

Day’s “research” was prompted by…. oh, I’ll let you figure it out.

All About Them

Here’s a story that leaves me conflicted. On one hand, this politely worded complaint is completely justified, given the circumstances;

Le Devoir reports that some 20 Canadian journalists camped out on the grounds of our Embassy in Port-au-Prince — which is being protected by members of the Canadian Forces — have been asked by staff to leave as soon as possible. […] “The priority for our diplomats is to help those in greatest need… those who’ve been affected by the earthquake… Water and food will be given to everyone… and the journalists can stay, but if they can find some other place, it would be greatly appreciated.”

But on the other, opportunities for the Earth to open up and swallow the lot of them don’t come along that often, either.

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